When it comes to certain projects, I like “doing things that don’t scale.”, particularly with my newsletter.

I noticed that my newsletter open rate was down over the past few months to about 40-45%. Not bad, but not as good as it once was.

A friend of mine suggested I ask people to respond to the email on occasion to help improve its reputation with Gmail/spam filters. When I did that this past month, my inbox was flooded with responses. I lost count of them if I’m being honest, but there were hundreds of them (possibly over a thousand)!

I was very touched to see the responses. Some people just said hi, and some people wrote in detail their thoughts around the issue, some people shared jokes, and some folks were just really nice and complimentary. It really melted my heart to see so many. I responded to a grand majority of them (by hand! No automations here!) and my poor inbox is a disaster.

But… it worked! My open rate is now back in the mid-50s! I’m happy with this (probably temporary?) outcome, and will continue to beat the drum that doing this kind of “manual” work is worth it.